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Category Archives: fat girl life

There have been a few times I’ve let fly on here about politics, but mostly I don’t go there because honestly, I’m not a journalist. Anything I say is just opinion. I read a lot and listen to a lot of NPR, so it might sometimes be decently well-informed opinion…but still. Trying to string words together in that way has never been my jam. I do funny (well, sort of), not eloquent.

I posted something on Facebook this morning that I want to get out to a wider audience, though. My Facebook list is comprised mostly of politically like-minded friends who are well informed on current events. Some of them are actively involved in local and national politics, and I’m pretty sure most of them vote. However, there are a handful who “don’t follow politics”. Which, I get it, politics are fucking exhausting…but like it or not, America is a political beast of our own making. These people that don’t follow politics, that don’t pay any attention to the news, and especially the ones that don’t vote? They break my heart, regardless of whether we have a Cheeto-stained Russian operative in the Oval Office or not.

So, I wrote this little rant directed at them and I want to pass it on to the wider world in the hopes that it motivates even just a couple people to look up from their phones, see what’s going on around them, and maybe choose to participate in civic life in even the tiniest way possible.

The offers I make below stand for anyone reading this here as well.

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For those of you who don’t follow politics, who feel like it’s all stupid and you can’t be bothered to get involved, know this: America cannot afford for you to keep your head in the sand any longer. If what you’re seeing / hearing on the news makes you uncomfortable, please take five minutes to fire off an email or a call to your members of Congress and BE HEARD. It might feel completely fruitless, but it’s something. If nothing else, it’s a written record of the fact that you didn’t just roll over and play dead.

You don’t have to call – you can email. If you need help finding your reps’ email address, let me know and I’ll happily find them for you. You don’t even have to email – you can use ResistBot to send a fax directly to your reps’ offices from your cell phone! Hit me up if you want help learning how to do that as well.

And if you’re not registered to vote, please, PLEASE remedy that immediately. If you need help understanding how to register, registration deadlines, etc, I would love to help you.

Please don’t just ignore everything going on lately and chalk it up to business as usual. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. This is the result of a handful of very rich, very self-serving people doing their level best to create a new world order. And if you’ve been paying any kind of attention at all, you’re hopefully catching on to the fact that that new world order they’re envisioning is not going to benefit the vast majority of us. All this going on right now is a result of too many people ignoring too much stuff for far too long.

Anyone who has ever worn a bra has probably experiences Laundry Day Bra Syndrome, or LDBS. LDBS happens when all your good bras are in the wash but you can’t / don’t want to go bra-less, so you pull out a old bra that has been relegated to the back of the drawer. You know, one of the bras that still has enough life in it to merit being saved from a ride to the dumpster, but that has enough wrong with it that you’ve removed it from daily rotation. It has become a back-up bra for occasions just like these. You don’t have to rely on these back-up bras very often so the memory of whatever physical horror they may have been causing that brought you to buy replacement bras has faded and been tinged rosy with nostalgia.

‘This was always a good bra’, you say to yourself as you pull it out of the drawer.

You put it on and pull up the straps (unless you’re one of those sorceresses that puts their bra on straps-first, in which case, I am both in awe and slightly afraid of you). You do the swoop-and-scoop maneuver and adjust your boobs in the cups. You look down at your very satisfactory cleavage and wonder why you don’t actually wear this bra more often. The shirt you don seems to sit better across your chest than ever before, and you vow to add this clearly lost gem of a bra back into your regular rotation.

All is happy and right. Tits up, shoulders back, you feel like you and your rediscovered favorite foundation garment can take on the world. You strut through the next couple hours of your day like the patriarchy-smashing goddess you were always meant to be. There’s that one tiny spot where the bra band is starting to ride up just a bit under your left arm, but it’s hardly even noticeable. You toss your hair triumphantly and throw the person bagging your groceries a little wink, just because.

As the day wears on, that tiny spot riding up under your left arm becomes a little larger. While bending down to reach for something, the whole left side of the bra’s band suddenly rolls up like a window shade that has been pulled too hard and sprung violently. It’s ok, though! Small price to pay for such great support, right? You look down to admire your rack again, then reach around and dig the rolled-up band out of your flesh with a smile. The band immediately starts to creep up again. You briefly consider sticking it down with some double-stick tape, then move on with your day.

By mid afternoon things have deteriorated significantly. You are embroiled in a near-constant struggle with the bra. Every time you move your left arm, the band rolls up into your armpit and requires excavation. When you turn to the right, the inside tip of the underwire pokes you in the side of your breast. The wonderful support you were so enamored with this morning has all but completely dissolved as the back of the bra will now not stay put at all. The structural integrity of the straps is questionable at best – one is digging so deeply into your shoulder that it’s compressing a nerve which is in turn causing three of your fingers to go numb, while the other one has loosened to the point of abject pointlessness. You now remember very clearly why this piece-of-shit waste-of-money symbol of oppression had been shoved in the back of your drawer, and that’s exactly where it’s going back to as soon as you can get away with taking it off. Because, after all, it’s still got enough life to merit keeping it a while longer even though it’s got issues. You know, as an emergency bra. You vow to make a tag that says “EMERGENCY ONLY” to affix to the bra as a warning to Future You.

There comes a moment – perhaps in the late afternoon, perhaps in the early evening – when you simply can’t take it anymore. It’s you or the bra, and since you’re the one with brain power and thumbs, you win. That fetid combination of spandex, wire and hate gets shucked off and flung across the room as you let out a whoop of relief.

The bra lays there, rejected, in the corner for a while. But it eventually gets picked up, washed, and put back into the drawer…where it will lurk in wait for the desperation of another laundry day when all the good bras are once again unavailable.

Well, I say “we”, but nobody mentioned it to me until I was already warming up my leftovers from home, so I’m filing that under my not being invited and I therefore did not partake.

ANYWAY.

So, the place where the food came from always includes a load of cookies…REALLY GOOD cookies…when they cater a lunch for us. Usually when we have one of these things, it’ll be like an hour of people yakking in the conference room, then they’ll all eat, then they’ll fuck off back to their desks and leave the leftovers for us admin peons. So even though I didn’t partake of the lunch proper, I had a pretty reasonable expectation of being able to scam some of those fantastic cookies after everyone cleared out and went back downstairs.

Except, today, the people putting on the conference hung around.

And hung around.

And hung. The fuck. Around.

Every time they moved around in there I’d perk up and think “ooh, this is it! Cookie time soon!” BUT NO. They would settle back down and talk more. I’ve been waiting for my cookie opportunity for MULTIPLE HOURS while these dicks sit around jawing about who even knows what. Nothing important, that’s for damn sure.

It’s now 3:40pm EST and they are FINALLY starting to pack stuff up in the conference room and move toward getting the hell out. Hooray! COOKIE TIME, YES?

Uhh, no. Because you know what happened? My boss gave the leftovers to the lady who put on the conference.

Literally all I wanted out of today was some of those cookies. Granted, I didn’t know the cookies were even going to be a thing until 12:30, but still. I looked forward to those damn cookies all afternoon.

You know what he said to the lady?

“Here, why don’t you take these cookies home, no one here will eat them.”

No one! No one will eat them! COOKIES! Are you MAD, sir? Have you taken a turn? DID YOUR MOMMA DROP YOU ON YOUR HEAD AS A BABY?!

1. Pretty much the only way to get me to consistently exercise is to make me pay for a set number of classes up front

I’ve been doing yoga for six or seven years now. As with most things in my life, the degree to which I am consistent with my yoga practice varies wildly depending on things like my mental state, my bank balance, which direction the wind is blowing, what I had for breakfast, whether Mercury is in retrograde…you get the picture. Classes that I have to shell out actual money for seem to be the only way I’ve found to stay really committed to the practice. It’s like my frugal Puritan ancestors are scowling down the generations at me whenever I think about skipping a class I’ve already paid for. Being a disappointment, even to completely imagined ancestors, is not something I handle well, so off to class I go!

2. I’m capable of more than I think

Watching the yoga teacher demonstrate the positions she wants us to get into often involves me snorting sarcastically in my head about how there’s no way my fat ass is going to be able to do that. But then, she sends us to our mats and starts walking us through the pose, and what do you know? I CAN actually do that! It’s not always easy and it’s NEVER pretty…but I can usually do it.

3. I’m not as capable of as much as I thought I’d be

The last time I took a real yoga class, I was about 50lbs lighter and quite a lot more regularly active. I had spent the previous seven winters stacking, carrying and re-stacking many tons of cord wood and 40lb bags of wood pellets to heat the little converted barn that I lived in. I was fat, yes…but also pretty strong. Nowadays, thanks to moving to more civilized living conditions (which I do NOT regret, just so we’re clear – I really like not having to get up and feed the woodstove at 2am just so the pipes don’t freeze), I haven’t had to haul more than the very occasional bag of pellets in about six years. I work a desk job where I often sit for six to eight hours straight without taking more than a two or three minute break to walk to the copier and back. The sum total of all these factors is that I’m still fat, but now I’m also a) nowhere near as strong as I once was and b) really fucking stiff and tight, especially through my lower body. There are dead simple things in yoga that I find INCREDIBLY hard to actually do. And that’s ok, honestly. I’m mostly at peace with it. Which leads me to #4…

4. I don’t have to keep up with anyone

Sally might have done six leg lifts to my three but it doesn’t. Fucking. Matter. We’re all doing what we CAN, and that’s enough. Have you ever tried to give yourself genuine, non-sarcastic, non-second-guessing credit for having done enough? It’s a lot fucking harder than it sounds, believe me…but it’s also very liberating.

5. I’m never going to magically become an extrovert

The class I take is a restorative class, which involves slow movements and poses held for a longer time. There’s a lot of focus on breath, even more-so than with standard yoga, and at the end of class the teacher takes us through a guided relaxation meditation. At the end of the meditation, we slowly sit up, settle back into ourselves, chant “om” a few times (which, honestly, I wasn’t down with it the first couple times but it has grown on me), and then the teacher invites everyone to “extend your greeting to others if you wish”. The first class I went to, I thought this meant saying a general “Namaste” to the room and then peacing the fuck out, BUT NO. What she means is saying “Namaste” to each. person. in. the. room. Like, one at a time, making deliberate eye contact with each person, bowing your head and saying “Namaste”. I’ll freely admit that I’m straight-up uncomfortable with this. It makes me anxious and completely harshes the mellow I just worked hard on developing over the last 90 minutes of class. After that first class I felt really bad about it, like I was a failure or really immature or something because I couldn’t do two seconds of mild bonding with a bunch of randos. But then that point #4 about doing enough started to kick in and I realized, you know what? Fuck it. She’s saying “extend your greeting IF YOU WISH”. If I don’t wish to extend my greeting, that’s my fucking business. Sitting there with my head bowed and eyes closed while everyone whispers “Namaste” around me is enough. I don’t have to feel bad about being an introvert, just like they don’t have to feel bad about being extroverts. I’ll do me, they can do them, and we’ll all leave class with mellows still intact.

6. I hate practicing. Like, I REALLY hate it

If my mom is reading this, she’s saying something like “no shit, Sherlock” at the computer screen right now, because I’ve ALWAYS been this way. Basketball, multiplication tables, guitar, lines for plays…the list of things she fought with me for refusing to practice as a kid is almost as long as the list she could make you of things that I just straight-up quit on because, if I couldn’t master something within a few tries, I basically wanted no part of it. I don’t know if it was a product of my ADHD or just a character flaw, but I never entirely grew out of it. It’s better than it used to be but it’s something I still struggle with, and yoga class has definitely been stirring it up for me lately. Logically I know that I’ll get better at things if I keep doing them, but the actual having to repeat things over and over that I KNOW I’m doing incorrectly bugs the shit out of me. Most of the time it’s not even a matter of comparing myself to others, like “oh, Sally can do downward dog without bending her knees and she’s like 70, I should be able to do that”. It’s simply, “the correct way to do downward dog is to not have to bend your knees. I physically can’t do it the correct way, so why bother doing it at all”.

The answer to which is that I paid money to be there so I better damn well do SOME kind of downward dog or those frugal Puritan fucks from #1 are going to come back to haunt the shit out of me, obviously.

More like NO pose. PS: I took this image from Yoga Journal. Hopefully telling you that means they won’t sue me. Ommmmmmmm.

Like this:

A few weeks back, I went shopping for some summer clothes. I bought, among other things, a pair of white twill capri pants. I have no business owning light-colored pants (or any other light-colored clothing, for that matter) to begin with, but these capri pants wouldn’t quit calling my name while I was wandering around the store (possibly because they actually fit my epic ass, which is a momentous thing. The fitting, not the ass. Well, both actually, but I digress…), so I said fuck it and bought them.

I hung the pants in my closet (only new clothes get hung up. After the first washing it’s laundro-bed all the way), and basically forgot that I bought them until this morning when I realized I was out of clean jeans…aaaand pretty much every other work-appropriate bottom-half covering garment. My options were a) wear the skirt I’m always vaguely uncomfortable in, b) wear the white capri pants, or c) come up with an excuse to work from home so I could just give up on adulting completely and wear yoga pants all day. Since I knew I had a meeting this morning that I couldn’t reschedule, staying home was struck from the list immediately (and sadly. So, so sadly). Vaguely uncomfortable skirt was a total no-go on meeting day as well because I can’t concentrate for shit when I’m self-conscious. So, white capri pants won by default.

Everything was going swimmingly as I got dressed. I even remembered to wear light-colored underpants so that people weren’t pointing and laughing at my shadow-wedgie any time I walked by. ADULT WARDROBING POINTS FOR ME! The capris actually fit even better this morning than when I tried them on in the dressing room, so that was good for a little happy dance. After putting on my shirt, I grabbed my phone and slid it into my pocket.

Except the phone landed on the carpet with a thud.

Because these pants?

THEY HAVE NO POCKETS.

Actually, to put a finer point on it, these pants have something worse than no pockets: they have those bullshit totally non-functional faux pockets:

Looks like a pocket, doesn’t it? Well it’s NOT a pocket. IT’S A TRAP. A BULLSHIT TRAP.

Because the fashion industry, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that all women are obviously more concerned with smooth lines on their clothing than they are with ACTUAL FUNCTIONALITY.

So now, instead of a slightly misshapen hip (which was going to be covered by my shirt anyway, fashion police), I have a slightly misshapen TIT because the only place I have to stash my phone is in my FREAKING BRA.

How is the threat of potentially short-circuiting my phone with boob sweat (or possibly more importantly, the idea of irradiating my boob with radio waves) a better idea than having pockets in these pants, fashion industry? I mean, granted, you’re not FORCING me to stash my phone in my cleavage. I COULD technically carry it around in my hand every time I get up and go do anything, thus rendering my hands half as useful as they’d be IF I HAD POCKETS.

And true, purses are technically an option that many ladies use. But I need my phone during the day. Do you know how idiotic it would be to have to carry a purse around the office all god damned day? PRETTY IDIOTIC. People would be side-eying me and saying stuff like “Geez, is she carrying coke around with her in that thing or something? And if she’s doing coke, why is she still so fat?” And then I’d have to be like “bitch, who needs coke when there’s cheese“, which would a) answer the fatness question and b) confuse everyone, and I’d have to explain to them the article that I just linked, except out loud in my own words, which is WAY more difficult for me because I get easily sidetracked talking about stuff like marmots and existentialism and the pros and cons of different forms of magnesium supplements, and basically at that point everybody loses.

The moral of this story, I think, is that if having actual functioning clothing is important to you, then you need to either a) be a man, b) be willing to wear men’s pants (which I’d be totally fine with if I could find ones that actually fit but apparently my Jessica Rabbit-esque waist-to-hip ratio precludes me from having that option), or c) check for pockets BEFORE you buy new pants. And don’t just check that it LOOKS like there are pockets – make sure you can actually get your hand, phone, vial of coke, marmot, or whatever else it is you want to not have to stash in your bra, into said pocket.

Don’t fall for the bullshit faux pocket trap. Let my suffering be a lesson to you all.